


i'll tear the night

by Graysworks



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Post S6, The End, they just make out a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 08:50:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15627135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Graysworks/pseuds/Graysworks
Summary: Shiro drags the sheets from his legs, untangles from the cocoon of blankets they'd been wrapped in before. The fire flickers and casts them a warm orange from the opposing wall, crackling, throwing a simple homeyness over the bare wooden room- and it's simple, but it's anything but plain. Some of the quilts slide to the floor while Shiro sets his feet on the smoothness of it."Keith," He says again, essentially breathes it, stirs around the air in his lungs and the room and their space. "You gonna be okay?"





	i'll tear the night

**Author's Note:**

> S7 HYYYYYPE
> 
> edit; this was right before the season dropped so my headcanon before was that they'd be on the Altean colony. Just, so the setting makes sense lol

"Keith," He whispers, into the stillness of their moonlit room. "Come back to bed."  
  
There's something too affected in it, but Shiro sits half-risen all the same from his nest, a label the others had jokingly given during their last visit inside. They'd had the choice of a sleek, modern sort of room like the rest, but Keith had taken one look at the secluded cottage near the forest- and that was that. He stands now at the low window sill and runs his hand along the curtain there, pale light spilling over him like water. The trees outside rustle in the wind around them.  
  
Shiro drags the sheets from his legs, untangles from the cocoon of blankets they'd been wrapped in before. The fire flickers and casts them a warm orange from the opposing wall, crackling, throwing a simple homeyness over the bare wooden room- and it's simple, but it's anything but plain. Some of the quilts slide to the floor while Shiro sets his feet on the smoothness of it.  
  
"Keith," He says again, essentially breathes it, stirs around the air in his lungs and the room and their space. "You gonna be okay?"  
  
It's another tally on the small guilts accumulating in his gut. He has no right to ask- not anymore, and not after what's happened, but the courage to work up the question has to count for something. Shiro tells himself as much when Keith's head bows forward at the stream of cold white hitting him through the window, painting him in grays and shadows with a striking contrast from the rest of the room. There's something settled in his exhaustion, but the lines of him still shake in the darkness, riddled with the stress and the time and the way his nails have gone clawed on the open sill again. He's flashing through it and he knows.  
  
"Yeah." A sliver of a rasp, one crack in the sanded panels of wood closing them into the room. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing Shiro's ever figured out how to hear the same way twice. He's hurting.  
  
But he's not hiding.  
  
The floorboards creak only slightly as Shiro puts full weight on his soles, and a few more soft quilts drag from the edge of the bunk. Four feet to where the fire doesn't reach anymore- four feet to where he's resided for the past twenty something days like this lost, bedraggled thing following the lines of the invisible map back to Keith. Wolf picks up his head as Shiro passes, tracks the movement from his corner beside the fire and in front of the door. He's been oddly intrigued by the two sleeping in a tangle recently.  
  
Keith's shirt is soft and loose under Shiro's hand when he reaches, curves his arm round the pull of muscle over ribs and breastbone and beating heart. He pushes his head into his friend's hair, and gathers him up as best he can with one arm, and tells himself the comfort counts for something when it feels like he couldn't be any further from the truth. This is selfish, needless need and a voiceless want and his all pained- "...don't stay up too late."  
  
This isn't what he'd ever expected of himself. The boy in his arm - _man_ \- lets out a breath that rattles his palm, rises and falls with their quiet fitting together, and Shiro wishes he could say that they're alright. When Keith is reaching to get his fingers on Shiro's hand, tipping to put his head against Shiro's neck, he wishes he could say they're where they should be. The heart under his touch beats like something old and steady in the earth. There was a time it was all flighty.  
  
"Shiro," Keith interrupts the train of thought in a second. Ragged. "Do you think we can work?"  
  
Without precedence. Without hesitation.  
  
He doesn't know where the question comes from, but Shiro's gut tells him that no, it's rare for things to just _work_ with him- maybe bad luck and a curse over his love where he puts it, a nightmare come to life in the past few months at _least_. He wants to tell Keith that people have walked away for less, but when it boils down to it, he already knows. That's the thing about being in love with his best friend of six, seven years. It's a relief as much as it isn't.  
  
"I..." He props his chin over Keith's shoulder, stares out at the night like it will give him some answer. "I just know that I don't deserve you, Keith." And it's what this cracks down to, in the end. A year and a half from Kerberos, where Keith had been ready to let him go for three, a war they had no business in joining but nearly died for nonetheless. The lack of time and the abrasion of meeting in the middle when he'd realized just how badly he'd screwed this up- and none of it redeemable. None of it even half close.  
  
Keith seems to think differently as his eyes close. "Don't put me on a pedestal, Shiro. Not like I did to you."  
  
His lips quirk, unbidden. "You grew out of that."  
  
"Ever wish I didn't?"  
  
It gives him pause, not because he doesn't know the answer- but because the delivery is ragged again, edged like something sharp lies in the undercurrent of it. Like _a brother to me, you're my brother_ , a little twinge of the unrecognizable bled into that old familiarity there. Keith has no right to assume. But he's not, and Shiro's letting go to turn him in the resuming stillness, and it's aching again, it's cold away from the fire. He'll settle for anything, but Keith has to know. Keith deserves to know.  
  
"Maybe once," He admits, honest. The shoulder under his hand is warm and solid, solid. "But things have changed."  
  
"Changed- how?" Keith _is_ inquisitive tonight. Eyes all soft, mouth twisted like a frown but lacking those furrowed brows that Shiro has come to read like his own face in the mirror. Some article from forgotten days of earth returns to haunt him, couples mimicking each other when they've fallen into step long enough- and he tries to remember a time it would've been someone else, but he can't. There's no comparison between the two. No world in which they exist on a level plane of _could have's_ and _what if's._  
  
This is war, he tells himself, but that's the thing. It wasn't war back then.  
  
"Shiro?"  
  
Keith waits for an answer like he'd stay there all night, and Shiro doesn't know how to tell him he shouldn't want to. They've grown older, wiser and meaner and maybe, he thinks, Keith is right. Maybe they won't work, not with enough strain, not if the cards happen to fall just right in the wrong direction one day, and maybe no amount of promises or second _chances_ or endless devotion will be able to save him in the end-  
  
"Changed how," He repeats back again, peculiarly quiet, without fanfare. Without sparks. Just the heavy stillness and the dark room and the something that sits even weightier around Shiro's lungs, waiting, waiting, bated. Keith's scar catches on some of the light, stands out like a brand- and Shiro has to keep reminding himself that's exactly what it is. He's marked Keith in ways neither of them can fix. But-  
  
_-maybe he wants to try._  
  
It settles like a thread, pulling one last seam into place.  
  
Hand on his chest, breathing his air. Keith's blue eyes and the rustle of leaves outside as the world continues moving on and on around them. They've been brothers, they've been best friends, they've been most everything but this and- it's killing Shiro to want more, killing him to invade Keith's space and still be afraid to touch. Keith does it for him, palm finding the nape of his neck and settling, squeezing, a shock to his system where it's bare skin and nothing more and nothing less and _too much_. He's stripped beauty in the cold light. Grown and scarred and stunning, and it still feels like something new.  
  
There was a time Shiro might've laughed at the thought of wanting Keith. Now it sinks warm and heady into his gut and makes itself known in a dozen little ways, each more impossible than the last. Even the pitch of his breath has changed with age. It warms Shiro to find how low, shaking in the new width of his shoulders, coaxing his head closer at a tilt just to familiarize himself. They're both afraid to make the first move and it would be laughable if it wasn't terrifying because out of them both, he should at _least_ be able to-  
  
"Shiro," Keith breathes into his space, and all bets are off.  
  
The first kiss is quiet, and uneventful, and his hand coming up to cradle Keith's head. Threading through the uneven-edged strands and sliding to the back of his skull and discovering it's the first time that he's touched him there, that he's settled and gripped and pushed and _taken_. It's special in all the ways it shouldn't be. Six-or-so years, and he's never put hands on Keith like this but by the way the latter is responding- he's feeling the fragility of it too. Keith's always been careful with him.  
  
Not like this. Not like this shaking thing pushing into his touch, tipping his head back when Shiro rises and dipping it down, down again while they both fall. The tidal nature of them is an old habit by now, but the way Keith can't settle is different. Like he wants an answer still.  
  
"You," Shiro tries to give him one, tries to gather him up again with one arm. "Changed."  
  
The noise catching in his throat doesn't sound like anything Shiro's heard before. "Wasn't jus' m-" He nearly trips while the latter walks him backward. "Me, Shiro, I-" The next sound that makes it out is quiet and pained, his back and the wall and a few dozen different bruises making themselves known to both again. Shiro's gut dissolves into heavy guilt with the recollection of it. Keith's head dips and hides, and it's almost second nature to drop everything at the sight, swear through a low stream of apologies and slow himself down.  
  
It takes a long time for Keith to look at him again. He bites his lip at some point, and the fangs are there. His eyes are searing when they come up, so different from the dull-angered cadet he'd been once, so different from the stubborn-faced soldier he tried to be after that. A hundred little diffusions into the one Shiro's fallen in love with.  
  
"Show me," He says.  
  
And Shiro tries.

**Author's Note:**

> [Wolf, still in the room: so I should... I should leave now? Is that a thing I should be doing? Hello?]


End file.
